I do not know a way to
characterize David Abel’s work so that I do it justice, and I mean that as a
very high compliment. I have seen works by him that look like musical or
performance scores (and indeed may be approached as such); I have seen works by
him that look like poems on the page; I have seen works by him in which each
page is a screen or curtain over another and another, and the wonders keep
revealing themselves as one turns pages. In other words, David Abel hails from
Basho through John Clare through Marcel Duchamp through Jackson Mac Low. He
pays attention to earth and sky, yet he looks at them as though there are
wonders yet to be discovered, by skewing the lens, or combining Q with Y, or
simply by paying attention for a little bit longer. He does pay attention for
great lengths of time, and such time he deserves from his audience as well, as
we will be rewarded.

In the current work, we
begin “in” states of extremity “intolerable” and “ineradicable.” Yet we turn to
see ourselves and remember “How I used to laugh at the mirror!” (104) In other
words, we live in the world, as humans in time, and it is only in time that we
can understand the extremes and also become one with them, “in the fold.”
Change, the day to day, the counting of breaths, the notice of shadows, the
rupture of living, constitutes the being of these poems. But while some other
poet might make a high drama of such moments, Abel’s great triumph is to lead
us, with language, to understand something fairly Buddhist about the progress
of our days. I say “with language” because even a sound can take us toward
understanding. Here, the sound is that made by “ure” in

a fissure

is a rupture

that is part rapture,

part scripture

a facture

that captures

the azure

in a texture

(117)

We may live in folds and
fissures, but we also live in our utterances, and Abel’s work is a reminder of
the pleasures of uttering a word such as “gusset.” (147)

This may sound like a
catalogue of simple pleasures and attentions, but a trip through the work will
belie such a notion, because “behind” and “beneath” take us not only into our
own underworlds, but into “the pain of others” and places where there are
“ghosts” and a growing “cyclone” that may engulf us, songbirds and all. (225)

I had thought I might try to
write a real introduction to the work, as a whole, of David Abel. But to invoke
one of his favorite poets, Robert Creeley (who can also be found within this
work), in writing of another poet, “Not even a sunrise could quite manage
that.” Yet the sun itself, shining over and around objects, creates shadows,
and “The shadow is a placeholder / for the double.” My double, your double, we
all have others, we all have shadows. You will find many of them here, in the words
and between the words, “out of the corner of the eye.” (259)

Today
has a number —
you count your paces
or I count my breaths,
and the campesinos with their brooms
sweep the paths of the calendar

113

the shadows
of true gaps

116

the book as a machine for exaggerating threshold

spooky shoes

117

for T.F.

a fissure
is a rupture
that is part rapture,
part scripture

a facture
that captures
the azure
in a texture

135

always
bunch
could
didn’t
everyone
first
get
house
idea
just
knew
lay
means
not
of
poisonous
quite
ready
shovel
those
up
vanished
what

you’re

147

Mini Essay for Joe Brainard

“Gusset” is a word that makes me happy just to know it.

158

it’s the odds — or the gods —

162

DO NOT POUR THE BOILING WATER INTO THE MERCHANDISE

168

We are haunted by our real-life.

202

the shade of our error

the horse that isn’t a horse until we name it

218

The Generations of Electricity

220

Not “Her” veil —
for which all literal veils are metaphors

another sense precedes
my metaphysics —

we make things,
that’s what we do

221

She likes the expression: life is densely filled, and she loves the densely filled life that is hers and the pleasure she takes in it, she loves people who share this pleasure with her, without affectation or gloom.

223

The Actual Teaching Practice of the School of Agility

It is significant that Zacconi speaks of the ornament of the repeated attack on the same note as the true door for entering into the art of passages . . .

The chain of events which results in the publication of certain books is often
wrought from links of coincidence. One of the most interesting phases of
American history embraces the removal of 60,000 Indians from the southern
states and their adaptation to a new home within what is now the State of
Oklahoma. If The Other Fifties were to realize its intent, few Americans would be
able to think of the 1950s as either simple, innocent, happy, unanimously
supportive of a broad spectrum of beliefs, or radically separated from the 1960s
by a culture of complacence. A new book by Richard Foreman is an event, but I
think that this book will astonish. When early writers told of the West and
Southwest, they were, with few exceptions, writing of a region east of the
Mississippi River. In relation to his true stature, Arnold Bax is now far and away
the most neglected British composer who flourished in the first half of the century.
Before reading this book, you should know a few facts about me. When an event
in history leaves behind a priceless piece of itself—a journal page, a map, a
leather shoe, a ship’s wooden skeleton—it is something worth noting. For the
past three summers, bystanders on the waterfront of the Egyptian city of
Alexandria have been treated to an unusual sight. “What? Alexander dead?
Impossible! The world would reek of his corpse!”

225

the behind or beneath
of mutually exclusive desires

“true” aspiration
corrupted?

if I believed in writing, dreaming,
assured of having everything in time

if I believed the pain of others
did not indict me

From the Polish

They were already ghosts, those two.
Years later, in another country,
name trimmed and oiled back,

From Another Tongue

The unfamiliar words wrapped around your ears
like the newspaper clutching the feet of less
fortunate girls on the high street,

To the Yiddish

Do songbirds tell me more
than the idling engine?
Out in the warm waters, a cyclone matures.

227

The view was, who knows, probably pretty.

228

The destruction of the body —
last prepositions.

About face.

Coffee —
Salami and eggs —
A fishing knot —
A figure of speech —

Will you testify to my intentions?
My testicles intestate.
Terrified on your best day.
My respite from abstention.
Will you transliterate my confessions?
My unspoken word.

My literal father is dead.
My literal mind a dead end.
Hunger will always hover behind every taste.
The hard labor of the other always goes unnaturalized.
Endlessly disposing we have displaced the world we so briefly, so blissfully were
alien to.
Only the buses left to remind our ears of the sea.

Fare well, Nature. Fare well, Nature.

238

I bought a Talking Love Stamp Parrot
for my Smelling Nose Dog

Kitchen magnets
for cancer survivors

Support our stockbrokers

242

“the die is cast”

an exhibit of dies

244

She can’t sleep
The chimes surround the loft, sirens at open windows and doors, the bed aloft an
island a raft she can’t stay strapped to its missing/insistent mast
Sirens also speed through her incomprehension
Wind itself — before it borrows bodies of metal, wood, water — rouses her from
feverish dreams
Dreams she refuses, again and again, each refusal taking root in another quarter
of her body, signal fires lighting the night —
Until she opens her eyes and cries out no one’s name

A socket in a ceiling
A cord between table and heaven, bringing the outside-in outside again
Doors and windows open to suddenly cool night air in the regressed café
The chessplayers: gendered, tattooed thought

The season’s first scarf
How many holes can culture make in a wall (before the wall is repaired)
We only know partitions, here in the lab

Larger and smaller than a clock
The science of credence unprized
Septic wonders of the world

She traced the edges of her lips with her fingertips as a necessary corollary of
speech subsumed

All scheduled light a work against the unnameable
(whose lungs burn so that this hand can cast its moving shadow?)
Whose sleeping child’s meal is warmed by the stabbing pain that tears through
your side?
The alternative energy of death

245

No day without a limit

246

Most of the talking goes on in North America.
Diarrhea — second to heart disease.
Let’s not talk about it (for 23 years).
Chris D. started a commie blog.
I want to re-embrace deeper pleasures,
but I’m lazy (or am I just afraid?).
I thought about telling all my secrets
(including the unremarkable ones) —
if I lecture you on a subject of serious importance,
you will cease to exist. Then I’ll see you?
800 million heartbeats — is that enough?
The corpse flower, titan arum, lives just one day.
(But not any particular day.)

247

Perhaps I will find my dark silence now.

It is midnight
and your birthday arrives unannounced
six feet six, without knocking

I’m washing dishes
I’m washing the cracked bowl
it is always midnight, here
in your birthday, the dark side
of the moon of your bright death

it has already been midnight
everywhere else, you were born
and you died everywhere but here
until this moment, here, in the space
between all the languages you wore
like a giant

Does she wait for you, bajo la luna —
you see her
with your voice
your delirious darkness
lit by a Cuban cigar

248

Meek School Garden Club Box

Forklore

1882: US Navy destroys the Tlingit village of Angoon

254

Nietzsche: the nerves of Shelley, the stomach of Carlyle, and the soul of a young lady.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearthside from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.

257

the train runs beside my life —
lines that don’t meet
except in the ear,
words to a song
from my parents’ childhood

259

The shadow is a placeholder
for the double

sustaining energy
the dark side of the moon
out of the corner of the eye

who dances, who upsets, who troubles the waters, who tells the story, who sings,
who watches in silence, who carries the news, who feeds the children, who sees
double, who gets lost, who finds the next safe haven by getting lost, who never
begins, who takes the reins, who calculates the equinox, who heals the sick, who
dies, who dies to die, who lives to die, who lives to live to die to die

_____________________________________________________________________________Author's Note on SWEEP:I embarked on this open-ended sequence nearly ten years ago. A collage of poetry, prose, and quotation, it is in equal parts journal, poem-sequence, and commonplace book; essentially, everything that I write that doesn't insist on its own autonomy is fair game to be incorporated into the ongoing drafts. Earlier sections appeared in Hubbub and are forthcoming in the second issue of pallaksch, pallaksch. The sections reproduced here include borrowings (in italics) from Marguerite Duras, Endi Hartigan, Christa Wolf, Czeslaw Milosz, Salvatore Sciarrino, Witold Gombrowicz, and Henry David Thoreau.

David Abelis the author of Float, a collection of collage texts spanning twenty-five years (Chax Press); Tether, a chapbook of poems (Barebone books); and Carrier, a hypergraphic visual sequence (c.L. Books), as well as numerous artist's books and chapbooks, most recently Elysian Ellipses and Shawarma Tractor. With Sam Lohmann, he publishes the Airfoil chapbook series. He is a founding member of the Spare Room reading series, now in its thirteenth year. An inaugural Research Fellow of the Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art, he curated the exhibitions Chax Press: Publishing Poetics for the Pacific NW College of Art and Object Poems for 23 Sandy Gallery. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works as an editor and is the proprietor of Passages Bookshop.

Charles Alexanderis a poet, publisher, and book artist. He is the director and editor-in-chief of Chax Press, one of the only independent presses which specializes in innovative poetry and the book arts.

The first
time we took a stab at Peep/Show, the paper slipped into the wrong place when
it went through the press, exquisitely saturated in black and white. We
delicately placed each mark by hand. There might be digital writing on Andromeda
and Perseus, an etching with aquatint, spit bite. There might be small folded
sheets of handmade Kozo papers in blues and naturals. There might be magical
secrets about pasting, printing, mounting, leafing.

We’re talking about a special technique in which an image is transferred
to a surface that is bonded to a heavier support. Place thin pieces of colored
paper, cut or torn to a desire shape into position on your plate, then glue the
paper and print with elements such as drawings or rice. This should be
performed by an experienced conservator because possible delamination may occur.

Let us be your experienced conservators. We wouldn’t want you to
delaminate.

A rough translation might be “thin paper attached with glue.” Wheat
paste, thinned. There is hand -rubbing over your anatomical heart, your rib cage.
This is a pink chair portrait on hand marbled paper, on a solar plate called “Togetherness”
or a one-of-a-kind sunflower in a series of 32. Obsessed, we've been locked
away, experimenting, adding visual embellishments.

We’re talking about engaging the surface, woodblock prints on Nepalese
paper, antique Japanese prints, on atsu kozo gami paper with black morita kami
chine-collé. There might be a trajectory that involves pieces of a dream, a thin sheet, fish, an investigation into a processional
sIide.

Either we’re playing in traffic or cashing in on the American dream. We love
birds and even this buzzard that was etched onto acetate before inking up. We
love winter apple trees, their monotypes in sugar-lift, aquatint, soft ground. Our
speed is infallible, an infallible etching as long as an hour.

Elizabeth Bryant is the author of seven
chapbooks, and a full-length book of serial prose-poetry (nevertheless
enjoyment (Quale Press, 2011). She has a second book
forthcoming in 2014, and her work will be included in In/Filtration, an
anthology of experimental Hudson Valley writers. She co-curated theBard Roving Reading Series, and publishes Five & Six, an ongoing photo/text interview
collaboration. Her current focus is on a project called Animal
Fragments, an exploration of human/animal images in the wilds of New York
State.

The
unplanned devised a plan to decide what was important and what was unimportant.
Passed out the straws and realized they were one short. By luck or accident
this was something that happened all unto itself. Perhaps it was a pregnant
plan performing atrocities from bed.

It was
about taking a stand.

And about shoes. I lost mine, then
stepped on something sharp. On this hill even the grass was sharp and cracked.

Did I bleed?

Did it matter?

Dyeable shoes making do in a shit
economy. Drab shoes. Sample shoes. Seasonal. Heeled. Sparkled. Sneaks. Tying on
the discounted. Discounts for the hoard. You couldn’t discount how his
political process creeped out his guests but nobody wants to be rude to the guy
providing the dinner and booze. They all decided to keep things light. This is
what they agreed. They will not think about pictures of his penis either angry
nor sated.

What penis?

No penis to see here.

Exactly.

The pregnant carried weight. The
pregnant had to go. Wobbly never won a beauty pageant.

Out-of-sight and off the scale.

A cart full of discounts and
grimaces making way to higher ground. Maybe there was a flood coming or maybe I
was there for the view or maybe I was taking my stand at a very reasonable
price, albeit one with blisters.

* * *

The beginning of something can be something of an ending, the future is The
Lovers, the future is over the hump and into the swamp, the future is an
implosion-happy bridegroom, the future is the casino paying out poorly printed
money, it’s going to hurt, foul future looking back at you.

An advertisement stuck on my Ace of
Spades, an advertisement printed underneath the advertisement on my Ace of
Spades, the future is bifocals, ads on a deck I already paid for, ads on a deck
I shoplifted long before advertising was invented.

It’s complicated, it’s count
clockwise, it skips around.

These cards portray the children of
snakes, my second favorite deck portrays the parents of propaganda, how is my
baby being telecast, how does my baby have more market share than me?

I consider the reversed, understand
nuances, understand it doesn’t change much, four piles of cards implicating the
same destiny, the Adorable Puppy used to be something else, something vicious,
now he’s just playful destruction, now when you hit him with a rolled up
newspaper he bites your lip while making enthusiastic love to the cavern of
your neck.

Someone has to do it, the lover’s
head among the fancy spread with meats and champagne, things change to paper
dragons, things change like a mighty empire, things change with the Lover
wearing an insensitive mask, yes, it’s good when they teach ladies how to
wrestle.

There’s a fast-food restaurant
called SPERM where the willow tree used to be, but one question, what’s on the
menu?

There bald men read your future by
gazing into your toilet.

The bald man looking through my
bowels, picks the High Priestess, he fishes the signifier out of the bowl,
these cards are showing their wear, this card stuck on the back my underwear,
the King and Queen of Diamonds tumble out, the face of the Magician worn off,
wishing that mage met the Empress and felt something close to abundance.

There’s a spunky sperm who was never
allowed, who is quite sure his mother would have loved him if she bothered to
know him.

This admission makes a difficult
time shuffling the waterlogged deck.

I don’t need clubs, I need a pair a
pants, can’t show up in only underwear, people expect decency, people expect a
cover up, people expect someone to wear the pants around here, people expect
the imaginary to know its place and remain in the imagination until its needed.

The boy cut his neck on a hookah
while fleeing on a donkey and now his mother and father are here to claim him.

Why should I cooperate?

Because we must do something to pass
this time along to the next in line.

The 3 of swords can tell you if
you’re compatible or not.

The attic doesn’t exist, it stands
for something unreachable by gut.

She’s wearing the red dress rippling
in my reflection, I flush a thousand times, flush as hard as I can.

She remains red and rippling.

That is what the Tower card warned
about and this is how I failed that advice.

How can there still be water to fill
the tank?

How am I so unloved?

The meaning of the Devil is passion
and temptation, it’s not the passions or the temptations that are foul, it’s
the people who own them.

Foul unlovable people.

There is no Hate card, I smudge what
is before me on the stall, in the deepest red and brown, far far past hate,
post-post-hate.

* * *

Under the
uterine sky the many windows reopened after the robbery, exposed vulnerable
like a matryoshka exhibit, crippled like a classmate. So many things taken,
toys and games and teeth and shoes and a silver birdcage. I don’t know where
they were stolen from but I knew they were gone and I couldn’t get them back.

I knew my
robbers; ex-lovers and cousins of friends with their pocket knives and
laughter, taking keys and iPhones along with all the other goodies. The ex was
the worst criminal and the worst of people, the
worst of all I spat and put up no fight because I couldn’t come up with a
purpose any of this would serve.

When they
left I locked the doors and hung the screens like fly traps. I huddled in my
womb of no entry and saw no trapdoor, not that I tried, not that I wanted to
ever get out or wanted anyone in.

I lived a
warm and cellular life until one day the house heaved and pushed me out and I
couldn’t get back in. Outside was too bright and cold for anyone to exist, yet
so many did.

Somehow I did too.

* * *

My trailer graffitied but it was
much worse than that. The animals inside hadn’t behaved, they went positively
wild. The leopard ate the caretaker and most of the cow. All that was left of
Mizmoo was her head and shoulder, sounding so mellow, mooing on the floor, like
she forgot a leopard gobbled her. Maybe she understood that her purpose was
delicious.

All I found of the caretaker was his
silent, severed foot.

Difficult to say if this was my
fault, if the animals should have been fed, if it was my responsibility to feed
them. Should I have separated them? Put up some kind of boundaries? I left them
as they arrived. Who was I to implement a change in the order? I barely could
make sense of the existing rules. Couldn’t even be sure the leopard was the
culprit, but the zebra hadn’t appeared as a contender. It had to be the
leopard, the zebra was inconsequential.

The scrawl on the outside of the
trailer:

THE VICTIM
IS

THE
PERPETRATOR IS

THE VICTIM
IS

THE
CULPRIT IS

THE
CASUALITY IS

THE FUSE
AND

THE FUTURE

JUST A
PAWN IN

THE END

An outfit calling itself “The
Carries” claimed authorship and included an email address.

Clearly an attack on my feminism
with bait for my reply.

I gave no reply nor showed any tears
or concern. I walked away and when I returned much later all that remained was
leather specks and bone splinters, piled like magic refried beans, like a pile
of runny shit caught in a rainstorm.

Don’t ever
bring my feminism into question again, you psycho-cunted arsonists, I
seethed to the specks and splinters, else
I’ll rain down onto you the most terrible Twitter mob who will tweet your
titties to crumbs.

* * *

On this meeting with this particular
ancestor named Carry, I was surprised by her mask and its thickness. Hardly a
way in or out. Not at all clownish but with brown scales, leather and bolts.

How strange to hear her speak
through the clamp for a mouth and to be seen through her single tiny eyehole.
How muffled her words sounded through the barriers. How uncomfortable to know
she cried behind that foulness not because it was foul, but for the sake of her
brother, an accused molester of the vulnerable.

Trouble
with the law. There’s always so much trouble with laws for this family.

Who did
this to you?

“The women and children, like they
always do, their cruel, perverted imaginations that they just can’t keep to
themselves. They have to share, and share for years, they whisper and then they
group together and then they testify and allow it all to go down as record.
They perverted it all, smote his perfect legacy.”

No, I mean
who put that mask on you? Why are you still wearing it? What is behind it?

“My brother placed it on me, for my
salvation. He’s my protector. There are so many terrible women and children
spouting their wretched tales, repeating and publicizing. They let nothing go!
What lies behind this mask hasn’t yet been penetrated. So little left that
hasn’t been penetrated. My face is one of the last pure bastions.”

You can
hardly see or speak through that mask and it smells like your skin is decaying
under there.

“Yes, the decay keeps me safe. Frightens away the children and many of
the women too. No one is going to scavenge me for their depraved narratives.
Forever I remain unmolested.”

But her corpsed-face remained unmolested no longer.

Because now I was there, smelling it, imagining its appearance,
inventing my memories.

* * *

I stepped through the door leading
to the alley, the kind of alley where back in the day, when a hero is a
helpless child, his parents might be killed right in front of him. There I
found myself in the middle of a bald man duel.

One bald man wore an argyle sweater
vest, the other had a reptile poking from the crown of his skull. One time my
father had a sweater vest so I knew not to look. One time my father was
possessed by a reptilian alien so I knew not to get close.

The duel was over quickly. A bald
man died. A bald man was the victor.

Unconsciously I stroked the dead
man’s head knowing there must have been relations a long time ago. His corpse
glowed a pregnant pox I hadn’t cared to remember until this death and once I
did care, I still couldn’t remember.

This was a game changer, if we
replaced the term “human beings” with “players” or “avatars.”

At Chalet Ice N Elk we prepared for
the invasion. Then they got my father and we were leaderless. We called Mom.
She screamed over the phone that she couldn’t help it if our father was a
reptilian assbeast and besides, she already did her time and now she was a free
agent fielding considerably better offers.

So we embraced our new world order
by adapting our lives to fit into alien society. All we could do to survive.